by Dan Simmons
“Get going,” the old poet had said. “Give my love to Aenea. Tell her that Uncle Martin is waiting to see Old Earth before he dies. Tell her that the old fart is eager to hear her expound the meanings of all motions, shapes, and sounds.” The essence of things.
“Oh,” I said aloud. “I’m sorry that Aenea is not here to talk to you.”
“So am I, boy,” whispered the old man in his own voice. “So am I. And don’t bring up that thermos of ashes the priest is carrying. That isn’t what I meant when I said I wanted to see my niece again before I died.”
I could only nod, feeling the pain in my throat and chest.
“What about the rest?” he demanded. “You goin’ to carry out my final request, or just let me die while you stand there with your big disciple’s thumb up your stupid ass?”
“Final request?” I repeated. My IQ seemed to drop fifty points when I was in the presence of Martin Silenus.
The voice synthesizer sighed. “Give me your stylus ’scriber there if you want me to spell it out in big block letters for you, boy. I want to see Old Earth before I croak. I want to go back there. I want to go home.”
IN THE END, IT WAS DECIDED THAT WE SHOULD NOT move him from his tower. The android medics conferred with the Ouster medics who finally were permitted to land who conferred with the autosurgeon aboard the Consul’s ship … which was parked just beyond the tower, exactly where A. Bettik had landed it some two months earlier after paying his time-debt for translation from Pacem System—which conferred electronically with the medical monitors surrounding the poet, as it had been constantly, and the verdict remained the same. It would probably kill him to take him aboard either the Consul’s ship or the treeship by removing him from his tower and submitting him to even the most subtle changes of gravity or pressure.
So we brought the tower and a large chunk of Endymion with us.
Ket Rosteen and the Ousters handled the details, bringing down half a dozen ergs from their lair on the giant treeship. I estimated later that about ten hectares actually rose into the air during that lovely Hyperion sunrise, including the tower, the Consul’s parked spaceship, the pulsing Mobius cubes that had transported the ergs, the parked skimmer, the kitchen and laundry annexes next to the tower, part of the old chemistry building on the Endymion campus, several stone dwellings, precisely half of the bridge over the Pinion River, and a few million metric tons of rock and subsoil. The liftoff was undetectable—the containment fields and lift fields were handled so perfectly by the ergs and their Ouster and Templar handlers that there was no hint of movement whatsoever, except for the morning sky becoming an unblinking starfield in the circular opening of Uncle Martin’s tower above our heads, and the holos in the sickroom that showed our progress. Standing in that room, the stars burning and rotating overhead, A. Bettik, Father de Soya, a few other android nurses, and I watched those direct-feed holos as I held the old man’s hand.
Endymion, our world’s oldest city and the source of my indigenie family’s name, slid silently up through sunrise and atmosphere to be embraced by the ten kilometers of perfect treeship waiting for us in high orbit. The Sequoia Sempervirens had parted its branches to make a perfect berth for us, so we could walk from Hyperion soil to the great bridges and branches and walkways of the ship with no sense of transition. Then the treeship turned out toward the stars.
“You will have to do the next part, Raul,” said the Dorje Phamo. “M. Silenus will not survive a Hawking-drive shift or the fugue or the time-debt necessary.”
“This is a damned big treeship,” I said. “Lots of people and machines aboard. You’ll help, I hope?”
“Of course,” said the tall woman with the wild, gray hair.
“Yes,” said the Dalai Lama and George and Jigme.
“We’ll help,” said Rachel as she stood next to Theo. Both women looked older.
“We will also try,” said Father de Soya, speaking for Ket Rosteen and the others gathered near.
High on the bridge of the ship, while A. Bettik tended to his former master some hundred meters below, the Dorje Phamo, Rachel, Theo, the Dalai Lama, George, Jigme, Father de Soya, the Templar captain, and the others held hands. I completed the rough circle. We closed our eyes and listened to the stars.
• • •
I HAD EXPECTED THE SKY-RIVER OF STARS THAT was the Lesser Magellanic Cloud to hang above the treeship as we emerged from light, but it was obvious that we were still in the Milky Way, still in our arm of the Milky Way, not that many light-years from Hyperion System, if the familiar constellations were to be believed. We had gone somewhere. But the world that burned above the branches was not the sea blue and cloud white of Old Earth, or even an Earth-like planet, but was a red and oceanless desert world with scattered pocks of volcanic or impact-crater acne and a gleaming white polar cap.
“Mars,” said A. Bettik. “We have returned to Old Earth System near the star named Sol.”
All of us heard the Void-voice resonance of Fedmahn Kassad on that world. We freecast down, found him, explained the voyage—he did not need the explanation because he had heard us coming through his own listening—and brought him back to the Sequoia Sempervirens with us. Martin Silenus sent up word that he wanted to speak to his old pilgrimage partner, and I walked the stairways and bridges to the tower with the soldier.
“Old Earth System is secure, just as the One Who Teaches commanded me,” said Kassad as we stepped onto the Hyperion soil where the fragment of city nestled in the treeship’s branches. “No Pax ships have tested our defenses for ten months. No one in-system, not even our own warships, will be allowed to approach closer than twenty million kilometers to Old Earth.”
“To Old Earth?” I repeated. I stopped in my tracks. Kassad stopped and turned his thin, dark visage toward me.
“You don’t know?” he said. The soldier pointed skyward, straight up toward where the treeship was accelerating under smooth, erg-managed full thrust.
It looked like a double star, as all planets with one large moon look. But I could see the pale glow of Luna, smaller, colder. And the warm blue and white pulse of life that was Old Earth.
A. Bettik joined us at the entrance to the tower. “When was it … when did they … how … when did it return?” I said, still looking up at Old Earth as it grew into a true sphere.
“At the time of the Shared Moment,” said Kassad. He brushed red dust from his black uniform, preparing himself to see the old poet.
“Does everyone know?” I said. Poor dumb Raul Endymion. Always the last one to get the word.
“Now they do,” said Colonel Fedmahn Kassad.
The three of us went up to see the dying man.
MARTIN SILENUS WAS IN GOOD HUMOR UPON MEETING his old friend after almost 280 years of separation.
“So your black killer’s soul is going to become the seed crystal when they build the Shrike a millennium hence, heh?” cackled the old man through his laboring speech synthesizer. “Well, thanks a shitload, Kassad.”
The soldier frowned down at the grinning mummy. “Why aren’t you dead, Martin?” the Colonel said at last.
“I am, I am,” said Silenus, coughing. “I quit breathing ages and eons ago. They just haven’t been smart enough to push me over and bury me yet.” The synthesizer did not try to articulate the chokes and rattles that followed.
“Did you ever finish your worthless prose poem?” asked the soldier as the old man continued to cough, sending the web of tubes and wires shaking.
“No,” I said, speaking for the coughing form in the bed. “He couldn’t.”
“Yes,” said Martin Silenus clearly through his throat mike. “I did.”
I just stood there.
“Actually,” cackled the poet, “he finished it for me.” The bony arm with its wrapping of parchment flesh rose slightly from the bed. A thumb distorted by arthritis jerked in my direction.
Colonel Kassad gave me a glance. I shook my head.
“Don’t be so fucking
dense, boy,” said Martin Silenus with what translated as an affectionate tone over the speaker. “See your ’scriber anywhere?”
I whirled and looked at the bedside tray where I had left it earlier. It was gone.
“All printed out. About a billion backup memories cut. Sent it out on the datasphere before we ’cast here,” rasped Silenus.
“There is no datasphere,” I said.
Martin Silenus laughed himself into a coughing fit. Eventually the synthesizer translated some of those coughs as, “You aren’t just dumb, boy. You’re helpless. What do you think the Void is? It’s the goddamn universe’s goddamn datasphere, boy. I been listenin’ to it for centuries before the kid gave me communion to do it with nanotech bugs in me. That’s what writers and artists and creators do, boy. Listen to the Void and try to hear dead folks’ thoughts. Feel their pain. The pain of living folks too. Finding a muse is just an artist or holy man’s way of getting a foot in the Void Which Binds’ front door. Aenea knew that. You should have too.”
“You had no right to transmit my narrative,” I said. “It’s mine. I wrote it. It’s not part of your Cantos” If I had known for sure which tube passing to him was his oxygen hose, I would have stepped on it till the rattling stopped.
“Bullshit, boy,” said Martin Silenus. “Why do you think I sent you on this eleven-year vacation?”
“To rescue Aenea,” I said.
The poet cackled and coughed. “She didn’t need rescuing, Raul. Hell, the way I saw it while it was happening, she pulled your worthless ass out of the fire more often than not. Even when the Shrike was doing the saving, it was only because that girl-child had tamed it for a bit.” The mummy’s white eyes with their video-pickup glasses turned toward Colonel Kassad. “Tamed you, I mean, you once and future killing machine.”
I stepped away from the bed and touched one of the biomonitors to steady myself. Overhead, in the wide circle that was the open top of the tower, Old Earth grew large and round. Martin Silenus’s voice called me back, almost taunting me. “But you haven’t finished it yet, boy. The Cantos aren’t done.”
I stared at him across the few cold meters of distance. “What do you mean, old man?”
“You’ve got to take me down there so we can finish it, Raul. Together.”
WE COULD NOT FREECAST DOWN TO OLD EARTH BECAUSE there was no one there for me to use as a beacon for the ’casting, so we decided to use the ergs to land the entire slab of Endymion city. This might be fatal to the old poet, but the old poet had shouted at us to for God’s sake shut the fuck up and get on with it, so we were. The Sequoia Sempervirens had been in low orbit around Old Earth—or just plain “Earth” as Martin Silenus demanded we call it—for several hours. The treeship’s optics, radar, and other sensors had shown a world empty of human life but healthy with animals, birds, fish, plants, and an atmosphere free of pollution. I had planned to land at Taliesin West, but telescopes showed the buildings gone. Only high desert remained, probably just as it was in the final days before Earth was supposed to have fallen into the Big Mistake of ’08 black hole. The Rome to which the second John Keats cybrid had returned was gone. All of the cities and structures which I thought of as the Lions’ and Tigers’ and Bears’ experimental reconstructions apparently were gone. The Earth had been scrubbed clean of cities and highways and signs of humankind. It throbbed with life and health as if awaiting our return.
I was near the base of the Consul’s ship on Hyperion soil in the city-within-the-treeship, surrounded by Aenea’s old friends and speaking aloud about the trip down, wondering who wanted to go and who should accompany us, thinking all the time only of the small metal canister in Father de Soya’s shoulder bag, when A. Bettik stepped forward and cleared his throat.
“Excuse me, M. Endymion, I do not mean to interrupt.” My old android friend seemed apologetic to the point of blushing under his blue skin, as he always did when he had to contradict one of us. “But M. Aenea left specific instructions with me should you return to Old Earth, as you obviously have.”
We all waited. I had not heard her give the android instructions on the Yggdrasill. But then, things had been very loud and confused there toward the end.
A. Bettik cleared his throat, “M. Aenea specified that Ket Rosteen should pilot the landing, if there were a landing, with four other individuals to disembark once landed, and asked me to apologize to all of you who wish to go down to Old Earth immediately,” he said. “Apologize especially, she said, to dear friends such as M. Rachel, M. Theo, and others who would be especially eager to see the planet. M. Aenea asked me to assure you that you would be welcome there two weeks from the landing day—on the last day before the treeship would leave orbit. And, she asked me to say, that in two standard years … that is, two Earth years, of course … anyone who could ’cast here on their own would be welcome to visit Old Earth.”
“Two years?” I said. “Why a two-year quarantine?”
A. Bettik shook his bald head. “M. Aenea did not specify, M. Endymion. I am sorry.”
I held up my hands, palms up. “Well, who does get to go down now?” I asked. If my name was not on the list, I was going to go down anyway, Aenea’s last wishes or not. I’d use my fists to get aboard, if need be. Or hijack the Consul’s ship and land it. Or freecast alone.
“You, sir,” said A. Bettik. “She quite specifically mentioned you, M. Endymion. And M. Silenus, of course. Father de Soya. And …” The android hesitated as if embarrassed again.
“Go on,” I said more sharply than I had intended.
“Me,” said A. Bettik.
“You,” I repeated. In a second it made sense to me. The android had made our long trip out with us … had, in fact, spent more time with Aenea than I had over the years because of the time-debt involved in my solo Odyssey. More than that, A. Bettik had risked his life for her, for us, and lost his arm in Nemes’s ambush on God’s Grove so many years ago. He had listened to Aenea’s teachings even before Rachel and Theo … or I … had signed on as disciples. Of course she would want her friend A. Bettik there when her few ashes were scattered in the breezes of Old Earth. I felt ashamed for acting surprised. “I am sorry,” I said aloud. “Of course you should come.”
A. Bettik nodded very slightly.
“Two weeks,” I said to the others, most of whose disappointment was visible on their faces. “In two weeks we’ll all be down there to look around, see what surprises the Lions and Tigers and Bears have left for us.”
There were good-byes as old friends. Templars, Ousters, and others left the soil of the city Endymion to watch from the treeship’s stairways and platforms. Rachel was the last to leave. To my surprise, she hugged me fiercely. “I hope to hell that you’re worth it,” she said in my ear. I had no idea what the feisty brunette was talking about. She—and most women—had always been a mystery to me.
“All right,” I said after we had trooped up the stairs to Martin Silenus’s bedside. I could see Old Earth … Earth … above us. The view grew hazy and then disappeared as the containment fields merged, thickened, and then separated, the drive fields flowed, and the city pulled away from the tree-ship. The Templar crew members and Ousters had rigged makeshift controls to the tower sickroom, which, with all of Martin Silenus’s medical machines hovering around, had become a very crowded space. I also thought that this was as good a place as any to sit out the ergs’ attempt to land a mass of rock and grass, a city with a tower and a parked spaceship, and a half stump of bridge leading nowhere, on a world that was three-fifths water and that had no spaceports or traffic control. At least, I thought, if we were going to crash and die, I might get a hint of the impending catastrophe from watching Ket Rosteen’s impassive visage under his overhanging Templar hood in the seconds before impact.
We did not feel entry into Earth’s atmosphere. Only the gradual change of the circle of sky above us from starfields to blueness let us know that we had entered successfully. We did not feel the landing. One moment we were standing
in silence, waiting, and then Ket Rosteen looked up from his displays and monitors, whispered something through the comlines to his beloved ergs, and said to us, “We’re down.”
“I forgot to tell you where we should land,” I said, thinking of the desert that had been Taliesin. It must be the place where Aenea had been happiest; where she would want those ashes—which I knew but still could not believe were hers—scattered in the warm Arizona winds.
Ket Rosteen glanced toward the floating deathbed.
“I told him where to fucking land,” rasped the old poet’s voice synthesizer. “Where I was born. Where I plan to die. Now, will you all please pull your collective thumbs out and roll me out of here so that I can see the sky?”
A. Bettik unplugged all of Silenus’s monitors, everything except the most essential life-support equipment, and tied everything together within the same EM repulsor field. While we were on the treeship, the androids and the Ouster crew clones and the Templars had built a long, gradual ramp from the top tower room down to the ground, then paved an exit walk to the edge of the city slab and beyond. All of this had landed intact I noticed as we accompanied the floating sickbed out into the sunlight and down. As we passed the Consul’s ebony spacecraft, a speaker on the hull of the ship said, “Good-bye, Martin Silenus. It was an honor knowing you.”
The ancient figure in the bed managed to lift one skeletal arm in a rather jaunty wave. “See you in hell, Ship.”
We left the city slab, stepped off the paved ramp, and looked out at grasslands and distant bluffs not so different from my childhood moors except for the line of forest to our right. The gravity and air pressure was as I remembered it from our four-year sojourn on Earth, although the air was much more humid here than in the desert.
“Where are we?” I asked of no one in particular. Ket Rosteen had stayed in the tower and only the android, the dying poet, Father de Soya, and I were outside now in what seemed to be morning sunlight in an early spring day in the northern hemisphere.
